His expression softened. “I do love to see you smile, Julia.”
Lucas had always possessed a knack for making her smile, even in the most trying of circumstances. She truly loved that part of him.
“I want to introduce you to some friends of mine,” he said.
“If it is a monarch or a disgruntled family member, we’ve already met.”
He laughed, and she felt lighter despite her worried mind. Lucas’s arm wrapped around her, and he turned them both to face the gathered gentlemen.
They were an impressive, if mismatched, group. Mr. Layton, looking loudly fashionable, as always, stood beside a gentleman who somehow managed to appear simultaneously elegant and humble. Near them stood a gentleman built on a larger scale, commanding in both appearance and air. Close to him stood a gentleman one would be entirely excused for taking no note of. He wasn’t even much smaller than the others; he simply drew little notice. The differences between her jovial, jesting Lucas and the very matter-of-fact Mr. Barrington were equally obvious. How had this band of opposites ever forged such an impenetrable friendship?
“Sweetheart,” Lucas said, “these are the Gents.”
She held up her hand to forestall the remainder of the introductions. “Allow me to guess.”
Lucas’s eyes danced. “Please do.”
Julia turned toward the most imposing of the gentlemen. “You, I am certain, are the one they refer to as the General.”
He bowed in acknowledgment.
“Lord Aldric Benick,” Lucas supplied. “Younger son of the Duke of Hartley.”
“A pleasure, Lord Aldric.”
“What is your next guess?” Lucas asked.
She turned her attention to the most unassuming of the men, who had eagerly watched everything and everyone. “I suspect you, sir, are Puppy.”
He, too, bowed. “Niles Greenberry, at your service, my lady.”
“I hope your moniker was given out of affection and not mockery.” Though the remark was said to the bearer of the nickname, she looked to Lucas for her answer.
“It most certainly was,” he said with an air of unmistakable sincerity.
Julia met the gentle gaze of the last of their newest houseguests. “You, then, are the one known as Archbishop.”
“Oui, madame. A name I did not choose, je t’assure.” There was no mistaking his accent.
“You are French,” she said.
“Yes,” Lucas said, “but we have forgiven him for that.”
Julia swatted at him playfully. “There is no mystery about you being called the Jester.”
“Alas, gentlemen, she has sorted us all, and easily.”
“I am not the least surprised,” the General said. “The Julia we heard about over the years would not be the least baffled by any puzzle we handed her.”
“He really did talk about me, then?”
All the men nodded emphatically.
“And now,” Archbishop said, “we wish to talk about him.” He made a shooing motion with his hands. “Pars maintenant, monsieur.”
Julia spun to face Lucas directly, her back to the others. In a frantic whisper, she pleaded, “Don’t go. Don’t leave me in here with strangers.”
“They will not mistreat you, Julia. If I thought there was the least chance they would, I would not have permitted them anywhere near this house.”
That did not relieve her misgivings. “What if I make a fool of myself? I haven’t a great deal of experience with guests.”
He took her face gently in his hands and smiled softly. “They already adore you; I promise they do. You have nothing to fear from them. I will be very nearby. Near enough to be at your side again in a matter of seconds. Can you grant them a few minutes?”
Knowing he was not leaving her behind without thought eased her worries. It was not his prolonged absences alone that had weighed on her heart over the years but how little consideration she was given when those opportunities arose. She was very quickly forgotten because, she feared, she wasn’t terribly important to him. She welcomed any indication that that had changed.
He pressed a kiss to her forehead. Julia’s breath caught. He had utilized that particular gesture often when she was little. It felt entirely different now.
He stepped back. “I won’t be gone long.”
She watched him leave the room, her heart leaving with him. Julia was not as fortified against his departures as she had been mere weeks earlier. With a strength she didn’t entirely feel, she turned to face the Gents.
Archbishop motioned her to a high-backed chair, empty and waiting. She sat, and the gentlemen did as well.
The General spoke for the group. “Lady Jonquil,” he said, “you have married an idiot.”
Her eyes nearly popped out of her head. She was absolutely certain her mouth hung a bit open.
“That idiot, however, is a brother to all of us, so we aren’t willing to simply toss him off Westminster.”
Julia tipped her chin upward and eyed him sternly. “You do that, and I’ll toss each of you in the Trent with a boulder tied to your limbs. Do not think for a moment I won’t.”
The smile she received from the stern-faced Lord Aldric was, she suspected, a very rare sight. And yet, it didn’t ill-suit him. “You really are his Julia, aren’t you?”
“His Julia?”
“We’ve heard stories for years. I don’t think even he realizes how often he’s spoken of you, how much of the past two decades he’s spent worrying about you, how much he’s missed you.”
“If he has missed me at all,” she said, “he has done a remarkable job of hiding it.”
“Again,” the General said, “an idiot.”
She tipped her head to one side. “I thought he was the Jester, not the Idiot.”
“We consider the two synonymous,” Mr. Barrington said.
She hated to admit it, even to herself, but she liked this group of gentlemen. She could understand why Lucas enjoyed spending time with them. “What do you actually call him?”
“Lucas,” Mr. Layton said. He pointed to the General. “Aldric.” He pointed to Puppy. “Niles.” Then to Archbishop. “Henri.” To Grumpy Uncle. “Kes. And”—he pressed his hand to his own chest—“Digby.”
“But what am I to call you?”
Archbishop reached over and took her hand in his, patting it kindly. “Lucas, he is our brother. That means you are our sister. You, madame, are one of us now. Call us the same as he does. Comme une famille.”
“And do you mean to call me Julia?”
“If you kill Aldric, we’ll likely start calling you ‘the Executioner,’” Mr. Barrington—Kes—said.
“Never you mind him,” Henri said. “He is forever grumpy.”
She looked at them, an unexpected warmth spreading through her heart. “Do you all truly mean to be brothers to me?”
“If you will allow it,” Digby said.
She smiled. “I would like that very much. I haven’t had siblings—honorary or otherwise—in a long time.”
Perhaps being a sister to the lot of them would make them less likely to be competitors. They might be willing to convince Lucas to see her as something other than a weight, an unwelcome option, a pointless addition to his life.
Henri patted her hand once more. “We all knew Stanley.”
A little lump formed in her throat as she realized what she should have pieced together before. “Was he one of you?”
“He was,” Digby said. “That is another reason we think of you so fondly.”
“What did you call him?”
“Stanley,” Kes said dryly.
A grin—an actual grin—spread across her face. These gentlemen were good for her soul.
Aldric answered directly, as she suspected was common for him. “He was known among us as the Highw
ayman.”
She laughed. “He was a criminal?”
“He was a risk-taker,” Digby said. “We never wanted for excitement when he was with us.”
“Stanley landed the lot of us into more trouble growing up than anyone ought,” Julia said. The memory didn’t cause her pain. When was the last time that had been true? “Lucas was the only voice of reason he would listen to, though Lucas encouraged their larks more often than not. And, I confess, I was generally the first to join in their misadventures. It is a miracle none of us accidentally burned down either of our family homes.”
The gentlemen wore similar looks of understanding. Stanley, with Lucas’s support, had likely talked them into a few misguided undertakings over the years.
“I miss him,” she said. “He was away for so much of my life, so much of the last years of his.” Four years had only dulled the ache of his passing. “I feel like I missed so much of who he was. And I’m discovering I know less of Lucas than I realized.”
“Ma sœur, we know him well. And we were part of Stanley’s last years before he left for war.”
She looked to them all. “Would you tell me about him?”
They all nodded.
“Do you promise at least some of the stories will be embarrassing for Lucas?”
Mischief touched every face in the room. Julia had been nervous upon first hearing that Lucas’s friends, the ones he’d kept in contact with, had descended upon Brier Hill. But now, she was glad they’d come.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lucas had climbed mountains with the Gents before. They’d covered nearly all the Peak District and had summited a few mountains in Scotland. He had mountaineered throughout Europe with Kes. But the mountains surrounding Brier Hill were, by far, the most familiar to all of them. Anytime they visited his home, they made a point of undertaking treks. This, however, was the first time they’d made a climb with Julia among them.
She fit the group perfectly. No matter that Lucas had been their friend for years, having her with him deepened the connection he felt to the group.
“I think Charlotte would have been a little bit in love with you, Digby.” Julia had begun calling all the Gents by the same names Lucas did, and they called her Our Julia.
“Stanley would never have permitted it,” Aldric said. “He was very protective of your sister.”
Julia looked at Lucas. “He was?”
“We both were.” He set his hand on her back, guiding her around a jutting rock in the trail. “Charlotte was so quietly tenderhearted that we worried people would take advantage of her. We didn’t want her to be hurt.”
“Did you worry about me?”
Lucas slipped his hand in hers. “Of course we did, but for different reasons. We feared someone would hurt her. We worried that you were going to murder someone.”
She laughed and adjusted her hand so their fingers threaded. “I was not so terrifying as that.”
“You most certainly were. I recall a time when you bullied the two of us into spending an entire night out on the old stone bridge in wind that would have felled a sailing ship.”
Chuckles rumbled through the group of Gents.
To them, Julia said, “They were very impressionable children.”
“We were seventeen,” Lucas said.
The chuckles exploded into full-throated laughter. Julia grinned. Her smiles were coming more easily of late. His efforts on that score were proving fruitful.
Whatever his friends had said to her in the sitting room the morning before, it was already helping. Part of their plan, no doubt. They would help, and they wouldn’t give up. Knowing they were implementing another of the General’s plans, Lucas felt less like he was walking on thin ice.
“There was also the time,” he said, “when you and Philip climbed onto the roof of the Collingham church to check a bird’s nest for eggs and couldn’t get back down, and you nearly convinced him to try to jump.”
She shook her head. “I am very glad he didn’t listen to me.”
“I wish you hadn’t listened to James the time he dared you to steal a horse from the Lampton stables. You were nearly killed.”
“C’est terrible. What happened?” Henri sounded properly terrified on her behalf.
Julia wrapped her other arm around Lucas’s, embracing his arm in hers. “I wasn’t old enough or skilled enough for anything beyond a pony. The horse I’d taken proved too much for me. In an instant, the mare was running, and I was helpless.”
Lud, he remembered that awful sight with perfect, horrible clarity. Had she been thrown, as tiny as she’d been and as fast as that horse had been running . . .
“Lucas jumped onto one of the other horses and raced after me. Somehow, he managed to calm my panicking mount and transfer me onto his.” She looked up at him. “And you didn’t even yell at me.”
“I did, however, give James a piece of my mind.”
“Did you tell your parents?” Kes asked him.
“I couldn’t toss James into the muck without getting Julia in trouble as well. She had suffered enough.”
Digby walked a bit ahead of them, somehow managing to strut even as he scrambled over a bit of rock. “We could have used Julia’s help when we stole those horses in Devon.”
Far from horrified, Julia looked intrigued. “You stole horses?”
“We’ve done a lot of things,” Lucas said under his breath.
Julia slipped her hand from his and moved to walk beside Aldric. “Was this horse theft part of one of your famous plans?”
“Of course it was.”
She looked back at Lucas, though she remained several paces ahead. “I very much like this group of yours. I suspect we are going to get into a great deal of trouble together in the years to come.”
Years to come. Years. He liked the sound of that.
Digby moved to Lucas’s side and said so only he could hear, “This is more the Julia you described to us over the years. I am enjoying finally meeting her.”
“She is a delight, isn’t she?”
Digby gave him a little shove. “Go make up sweet to your wife.”
“Doing so won’t ruin whatever secret plans the lot of you have concocted?”
“Not in the least.”
That was enough reassurance for Lucas. He hurried toward Aldric and Julia and took her hand once more. “We’ve made this trek more recently than any of the others,” he said. “Do you think we can beat them to the top?”
“With our eyes closed.”
“Careful there, Our Julia,” Kes called out. “He is an impressionable child.”
Lucas and Julia walked swiftly up the trail. How easily he could imagine her at his side in the Peak District and those mountaintops in Scotland, the Rue Des Barres and Champs-Elysées in Paris, the high meadows of Switzerland. But she’d not ever expressed any interest in traveling or adventures. She’d even said she was happy only in the quiet confines of home. She had told Lucas himself that she was not the adventurous type. She’d told Kes she preferred being at home. He didn’t know how to reconcile that difference in them.
Quite without warning, a gust of cold wind burst around a bend in the mountain trail. Lucas pulled Julia to him and tucked them up against an outcropping of rock.
Julia held tight to his coat. “Heavens, that is brutally cold.”
“We need to get you a warmer coat, sweetheart, and not merely for these treks. It’s colder here than in Collingham.”
She leaned back a little. “This scarf is helpful, though.” She held up the end of it, but the wind snatched it away. It flew upward, entangling itself out of reach in a bramble bush above the trail. “Oh bother.”
“Never fear, Julia. I’ll fetch it.”
“It is up those rocks though. There’s no trail leading to it.”
He toss
ed her a look of feigned arrogance. “I don’t need a trail.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. The wind had died down, but it was far from warm. He’d grab her scarf and return quickly.
Scrambling up rocks was not so difficult as it had once been. He didn’t ever attempt to scale sheer rock faces, but he certainly didn’t require smooth paths and a handrail. One handhold, one foothold at a time, he climbed upward. With ease born of practice, he reached his destination and grabbed hold of her scarf, then wrapped it around his own neck, wanting both hands free to make the descent back to Julia.
“Your scarf, my lady.” He knelt in front of her, holding the scarf up in both hands as if presenting a tribute to a queen.
She set her hand not on the scarf but on his cheek. “What if you’d fallen?”
“I’ve made much more difficult climbs, my dear. There was very little risk.” He stood. Her hand dropped to his chest, and she didn’t pull it away.
Lucas gently and carefully set her scarf around her neck once more, tying a loose knot so the wind wouldn’t whip it away so easily. He slipped his hand around hers, lifting it from his chest, and kissed her gloved fingers.
Julia rose up on her toes. “Thank you for returning my scarf.” She kissed his cheek, then didn’t step back.
Hesitantly but hopefully, he set his free arm around her. She settled against him. He held her, there on his mountain, the wind swirling around them. He’d seen some of the most breathtaking vistas in the kingdom and on the Continent, but that moment, that spot, rivaled them all.
And then the Gents arrived and ruined it all.
Their loud conversation and boisterous laughter broke the spell. Julia pulled back, smiling at the others as she told them how he had bravely retrieved her scarf. Before he could even call her back, she continued up the trail with his friends.
He rubbed at his neck, unsure what to do, struggling to focus his thoughts. Things between the two of them were better but still so uncertain.
Aldric passed by.
“Is this part of your plan?” Lucas asked, motioning to Julia talking with Henri up ahead.
“Are you losing faith in us?” Aldric’s nostrils flared, and his lips pressed in a line of disapproval.
Forget Me Not (The Gents Book #1) Page 18